21 - When You Are In It For the Long Haul: How to Address Challenges Facing a Multi-year Statewide Community Power Building Evaluation

Abstract Information: Evaluating long-term community power-building projects over multiple years presents a range of obstacles, such as the impact of unforeseen events like pandemics, shifts in local politics and economies, changes in leadership among grantees, shifts in foundation staff and their priorities, and evaluator changes. Initiatives funded by philanthropy that aim to enhance the collective strength and influence of traditionally marginalized groups are particularly susceptible to these fluctuations. These initiatives often provoke controversy, challenge the status quo that foundations may represent, and struggle to prove their impact, as their success isn't always widely recognized or tangible—challenges that become more pronounced under close examination. The Colorado Trust implemented Building and Bridging Power (BBP) strategy to support 23 grantees from both rural and urban areas in Colorado, all of which encountered a mix of similar and unique problems. BBP grantees addressed different issues for different populations under different conditions.. This poster will present the practical steps taken to overcome them and the lessons of the evaluation team and foundation that other evaluators can apply to their future work . This poster will also present lessons form the evalaution regardong the  implementation of the evaluation, embedding languages, cultures, and situational nuances of those involved in the assessment. The poster will describe how the evaluation embraced developing and incorporating principles of language justice, including a diverse evaluation team who personally related to the experiences of the grantee communities, involved grantees in the creation of assessment tools and the development of the change theory, and utilized a comparative case study approach. The third component of this poster will present the development of metrics used to gauge community influence, considering changes within the foundation's leadership and board objectives. This includes detailing how the evaluation team and foundation staff navigated the challenges of balancing quantitative and qualitative metrics as raised by board members and leadership. and how the evaluation team framed the concept of power-building within the foundation's focus on health equity.